No One Seems to Have an Answer to Germany’s Far Right

For ten years, Thuringia was the only state in Germany with a president from left-wing party Die Linke. That was until September 1, when it fell to just fourth place in elections to the state parliament.

In regional capital Erfurt, members and sympathizers of Die Linke assembled in a building close to the railways to follow the election night. Gloomy preelection polls soon materialized into even more dismal results. For the first time in the history of the postwar Federal Republic, a far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), had won a state election.

Thuringia’s president, Bodo Ramelow, who will remain in post until a replacement is elected by the parliament, addressed Die Linke activists who had come to follow the results. On a historical note, Ramelow remarked that Erfurt is the city where the ovens for Auschwitz were produced — and promised to do everything possible to prevent AfD from reaching power.

Further east, elections to Saxony’s regional parliament on the same day also handed a strong result to the AfD. There, it gathered 31 percent of votes, one point behind the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) headed by incumbent regional president Michael Kretschmer. The CDU partly owes its narrow victory to AfD’s failure to collect all the votes right of the CDU, with 2.2 percent going to the even more extreme Freie Sachsen.

After the elections in Thuringia, all the other parties announced they would not reach coalition agreements with AfD. Still, it will hold indirect power.

The CDU managed to hold its ground. But even its own dramatic move to the Right over recent years did not capture former AfD voters or stall this party’s rise. Its fate is just further proof that no one seems to have an answer to Germany’s…